ENCA 102 Week 5 Increasing Consumption of Junk Food Paper
Writing is a process of discovery, and you don’t always produce your best stuff when you first get started. So revision is a chance for you to look critically at what you have written to see:if it’s really worth saying, if it says what you wanted to say, and if a reader will understand what you’re saying.
Learning Outcomes
- Understand the process of writing as inquiry.
- Distinguish between revising and editing
- Discover the impact of revision on your draft
What You Will Learn
- Understand the elements of revision
- How to revise the college essay
- Identify issues around your draft
- Recognize fallacies in your essay
You will complete…
Learning Activities
Read
- Textbook Reading: Introduction, Rethinking the Research Paper, The Curious Researcher: A Guide to Writing Research Papers.
- PowerPoints
- 1. READ FOR STRUCTURE.
You’ve got the content down and have spent time rewriting sections that needed a little boost. Now, it’s time to do some reading.One of the first times you read through, be intentional about looking for the overall organization, structure and flow of the paper. Imagine yourself as your classmate or instructor. Would they be able to follow your topic easily?Similar to the revising process, this first read through of your paper looks at the big picture. Does it accomplish the goals you’ve originally set out to achieve?Ask yourself key questions such as:
- Does your paper support and contribute to your thesis in your introduction?
- Does the order of your sentences flow smoothly within a paragraph?
- Does the tone of each sentence match the rest of the paper?
- Do your paragraphs flow smoothly and logically with transitions?
- Are your sentences clear and uncluttered?
- Is the tone and style consistent throughout each sentence?
- Reading through your paper, whether silently or aloud, with a broader view will help you pick out areas that don’t flow together well.2. READ FOR GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION.
Next, look into the details of your paper. This is the part of the editing process you may think of most often—looking at grammar, punctuation, word choice and other nitty-gritty details.In reading through your paper with your focus on the details, ask questions such as:
- Is everything spelled correctly?
- Are all punctuation marks used accurately?
- Are all your citations formatted correctly?
- Does the vocabulary you use appropriate for the topic?
- Do each of the sentences maintain the appropriate verb tense?
- Do you use too many cliches that cloud your argument?
- Do all sentences maintain parallel structure?
- As you write more papers and continue to revisit the editing process, you’ll be able to identify the errors that you tend to make most often. You’ll get a better sense of your tone and style of writing. With practice, this editing process will get easier.3. STOP YOUR WORKING.
You’re on a deadline and the next step is to stop working? What?While it may seem most efficient to power through and move right from writing to revising to all stages of editing, it’s also not the most effective. Stepping away from your paper, whether for a day or just an hour, allows you to revisit the work with a fresh set of eyes.Here’s what Christopher Melotti said in his LinkedIn post of the importance of taking a break in the editing process:Through this distance, when you come to edit the writing after a sufficient amount of time, you will be in a far better position to see the flaws and the errors that you would otherwise have missed, simply because at the time of writing, you were too heavily invested.Allow yourself time to take a break. Doing so will help you reset, refocus and make your next read-through more effective.4. READ ALOUD ONCE MORE.
If you haven’t read your paper aloud yet, do it. Yes, it might feel silly at first, but reading your paper out loud lets you hear and notice things that you didn’t catch in your first few read throughs. Whether you read it aloud yourself or have someone read it to you, hearing your content gives you a new way of reviewing.According to a resource provided by the Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reading your work aloud has several benefits:When you read your draft out loud or listen to someone else read it, your brain gets the information in a new way, and you may notice things that you didn’t see before… Sometimes sentences aren’t grammatically incorrect, but they are still awkward in some way—too long, too convoluted, too repetitive. Problems like these are often easily heard.So find a quiet room, grab a glass of water and use your ears in this stage of the editing process.5. PHONE A FRIEND.
You’ve written and you’ve read—several times. You may know your thesis by heart now. You could probably condense all the content and tell it as a bedtime story to your child. The next step, while not always necessary but certainly helpful, is having someone else do some of the work. Have a friend, classmate, coworker, mentor read through your paper.Why is having someone else go through your paper beneficial?It’s all about getting a fresh set of eyes on the content. Like how you took a break from editing your paper so you could return to it refreshed, so peer review can highlight mistakes you may not have realized.While peer review can happen at a variety of stages in the editing process—from a rough to a near-final draft—it helps to have done some editing yourself before handing it over. It’ll save time for your reviewer and keep you from frequently blushing about those mistakes you knew were wrong but missed while writing.It’s easy to overlook errors when editing your own writing because your brain automatically fills in the blanks of what you meant to say. A editor other than yourself can help you determine when your writing doesn’t clearly express your ideas.Have your friend ask similar questions you’ve asked yourself during your revision and editing processes. Be sure to include both big picture and detailed questions.